Many artificial mechanisms have been suggested in the past in an attempt to imitate the way birds, insects and other animals with wings are flying. This resulted in a number of different constructions. Some of these mechanisms were designed for use in mechanical bird toys while others were designed for use in much larger implementations. However, existing approaches have limitations preventing the wing flapping motions from being fully optimized during a flight. Thus, they are only partially successful in addressing the challenge of creating wing flapping mechanisms that are truly capable of flying as some animals do, particularly birds.
Examples of suggested mechanisms can be found in documents such as U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2002/0117583 A1 published 29 Aug. 2002 to Hamamoto et al., U.S. Pat. No. 7,651,051 B2 issued 26 Jan. 2010 to Agrawal et al., German Patent Application No. DE 10 2009 015 974 A1 published on 30 Sep. 2010 to FESTO AG & CO, and U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2012/0003896 published 5 Jan. 2012 to Van Ruymbeke, to name just a few.
Overall, there is still room for many improvements in this area of technology.